Lehmann, Alfred
"Das Bildnis bei den altdeutschen Meistern bis auf Dürer" by Alfred Lehmann is an art-historical study written in the early 20th century. It investigates how the human image in German art developed from typified figures to true portraits before the Renaissance, focusing on manuscripts, wall and panel painting, sculpture, medals, woodcuts, and engravings up to Dürer. The work defines key portrait categories (from “typical” to fully “portrait”) and pays special attention to donor images within altarpieces as well as emerging independent likenesses.The opening of the study presents its origin as an expanded doctoral dissertation and sets a broad scope: tracing the human image from the Carolingian era through the later Middle Ages, with the main body devoted to three strands of portraiture—holy or secular figures in altarpieces, donor portraits, and autonomous portraits—followed by a synthetic cultural analysis. It clarifies terminology by sharply distinguishing “typical,” “individual,” “individual-characteristic,” “portrait-like,” and “portrait.” The introduction argues that German art’s core drive is individualization and characterization, contrasts Cologne’s mystical idealism with later realism, explains the long post–16th-century decline by foreign influence and war rather than the Reformation alone, and notes a modern revival of a distinctly German manner marked by inwardness, simplicity, richness, movement, and love of nature. At the start of the first part, the author outl…
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